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/ 10 September 2006
A suicide bomber assassinated an Afghan provincial governor on Sunday, as Nato said it killed almost 100 more Taliban fighters in its biggest offensive against the resurgent Islamist group. Governor Hakim Taniwal, a former mines minister who once lectured in an Australian university, is the first provincial chief killed since the Taliban fell five years ago.
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/ 10 September 2006
President Hamid Karzai Sunday formally opened a $25-million Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of the most significant investments in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban five years ago. Karzai said it was an endorsement of the government’s efforts to push ahead with reconstruction of the war-damaged country.
A United States-led coalition warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on an Afghan police convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing 12 police officers, a police commander said. The coalition confirmed "an event did happen" and said it was collecting details.
The United States military said on Saturday it had captured four suspected al-Qaeda operatives in a raid on their hideout in eastern Afghanistan. There were no casualties on either side during the operation conducted early on Saturday in Sal Kalay village in Khost province near the Pakistan border, it said in a statement.
All 16 people including two Dutch soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan, a military coalition spokesperson announced on Thursday. The civilian MI8 helicopter crashed into mountains for unknown reasons near south-eastern Paktia province on Wednesday.
More than 600 rebels have been killed in the past 45 days of the biggest anti-Taliban operation since the hard-liners were removed from government in 2001, the United States-led coalition said on Tuesday. Operation Mountain Thrust involves about 10 000 Afghan and coalition troops and support staff.
Simone Thibaudeau hates boring holidays and Claude Fievet loves Central Asia. So when they were invited on a package tour of Afghanistan, the woman of 73 and the man of 80 did not hesitate. "A trip to Afghanistan was so tempting that we decided to do it practically without hesitation and we have no regrets," said Thibaudeau.
Simone Thibaudeau hates boring holidays and Claude Fievet loves Central Asia. So when they were invited on a package tour of Afghanistan, the woman of 73 and the man of 80 did not hesitate. In a Kabul hotel after three weeks in the north of a country that is more associated with war than tourism, they were tired but inspired.
Afghanistan’s Taliban rebels have taken advantage of a power vacuum and grown stronger because the world’s attention has been distracted by Iraq, the commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) forces in the country said. British General David Richards said he was "optimistic" of defeating the movement.
The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world’s heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the Western-funded war on narcotics. British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual United Nations poppy survey.
The United States-led coalition in Afghanistan said on Wednesday an initial investigation showed that troops opened fire in "self-defence" this week after a deadly traffic accident set off widespread rioting. Afghan officials had told the coalition that 20 people were killed and 160 wounded in the accident and subsequent rioting that engulfed the city on Monday.
Rioters tore through the capital of Afghanistan on Monday, chanting ”Death to America” and torching cars and buildings after United States troops shot dead at least four people following a traffic accident. Gunshots could be heard near Kabul’s diplomatic quarter as restaurants, shops, cars and dozens of police posts were set ablaze.
Fresh insurgent attacks across Afghanistan have claimed nearly 20 more lives, including three police officers and 12 Taliban fighters, officials said on Tuesday. About 300 people have already died in recent days in some of the heaviest fighting since the radical Islamic Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001.
A United States helicopter involved in an anti-Taliban combat operation crashed in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing all 10 US soldiers on board, the US military said on Saturday. The crash of the Chinook in Kunar province late on Friday was another blow to coalition forces in Afghanistan after a bomb killed two Italian soldiers near the capital the same day.
Afghanistan, Myanmar and Malaysia confirmed outbreaks of the H5N1 strain of bird flu and took urgent protective measures on Thursday as the deadly virus continued its march across Asia. Meanwhile, a strain of the bird-flu virus has been found in a dead stray dog in Azerbaijan.
United States President George Bush arrived in Afghanistan on Wednesday for his first visit since US-led forces toppled the Taliban regime in 2001. Bush made the surprise stopover, landing at the US military base at Bagram, north of Kabul, as he headed to India to begin a maiden trip to South Asia
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/ 10 February 2006
Police arrested two South African nationals trying to leave Afghanistan’s main airport with two kilograms of heroin hidden in a photo album, an official said on Friday. The men, carrying doctored South African passports, were trying to fly to China on Thursday, airport police chief Aminaullah Khan told Agence France-Presse.
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/ 8 November 2005
President Hamid Karzai officially opened the most luxurious hotel in destitute Afghanistan on Tuesday, with the five-star Kabul Serena touted as a means to lure investors and dollar-spending tourists. The $36,5-million hotel, opposite the heavily fortified presidential palace, is an almost-total overhaul of the once-famous Kabul Hotel that was badly damaged in the 1992-1996 civil war.
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/ 14 September 2005
Less than a year after winning Afghanistan’s first presidential vote, Hamid Karzai will have to curb the power of warlords and opium kingpins who are likely to be elected to the nation’s new Parliament. Karzai has stamped his authority outside the capital in the past 11 months by taming some of the most powerful former mujahedin commanders, giving them central government positions to weaken their regional power bases.
Afghan intelligence officials have thwarted a plot to assassinate US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and arrested three Pakistanis armed with rocket propelled grenades and assault rifles, a spokesperson for President Hamid Karzai said on Monday. Two senior Afghan officials said the men had confessed to their crimes and said they were in Afghanistan ”to fight jihad.”
A bicycle bomb aimed at a vehicle carrying Nao-led peacekeepers exploded on Monday east of the Afghan capital Kabul, wounding at least seven Afghan civilians, some seriously, police and officials said. The remote-controlled bomb was set on a bicycle left on the side of the main road from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad and detonated at about 9.30am.
Radical Afghan clerics on Tuesday unveiled plans to launch the country’s first Islamic television channel since the fall of the fundamentalist Taliban regime. A group of hardline religious scholars, or mullahs, said the station would counter what they say are immoral and un-Islamic programmes being broadcast by other channels.
A dam ruptured in southern Afghanistan early on Tuesday, unleashing floods that killed at least six people and washed away hundreds of houses and shops, the provincial governor said. The United States military sent Black Hawk helicopters to help with rescue operations after the Bandi Sultan dam burst.
United States military helicopters airlifted stranded families to safety and aid agencies distributed vital food after devastating floods in Afghanistan left nearly 200 people dead, officials said on Monday. Torrents of melting snow and fierce rains caused rivers to burst their banks in many parts of the poverty-stricken country.
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/ 18 February 2005
Aid workers in Afghanistan said on Friday they feared up to 1Â 000 children may have died from cold and malnutrition during severe winter weather affecting the west of the war-shattered country. Western Ghor province has been hit hard by snowstorms in Afghanistan’s worst winter for more than a decade and most of the province remains out of reach of humanitarian aid.
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/ 4 February 2005
Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital. The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul.
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/ 9 December 2004
Only two days after his inauguration, President Hamid Karzai is already trying to get the message out — Afghanistan needs to stem its booming drugs trade if the country is going to move forward. With the ink barely dry after his swearing in, Karzai has called a two-day meeting of tribal elders and provincial officials from around Afghanistan to discuss strategies to combat the drugs trade.
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/ 28 October 2004
Armed men wearing military-style jackets abducted three foreign United Nations election workers in broad daylight in Kabul on Thursday as vote-counting ended in Afghanistan’s landmark election. A group calling itself the Army of Muslims claimed responsibility, Arabic satellite television station Al-Jazeera reported.
Rockets rained on Afghan cities and military posts and a huge truck bomb was seized as the war-weary nation prepared for Saturday’s presidential elections. The embassy district in the capital, Kabul, was among the targets as more than two dozen rockets were fired around the country in a 24-hour period, a spokesman for the United States-led coalition said.
The FBI on Tuesday took over the probe into the weekend bombing of a United States security firm in Kabul as the Afghan capital braced for further potential attacks in the run-up to the country’s landmark presidential election. At least nine people were killed and dozens injured in Sunday’s blast.
The United States government warned its citizens to keep a low profile on Monday after a car bomb hit a private US security firm in the Afghan capital, killing at least seven people, including two Americans. The Taliban claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack on the office of Dyncorp, which provides bodyguards for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and works for the American government in Iraq.
Twenty-seven people, including children, were injured on Wednesday in two explosions that rocked a city in eastern Afghanistan, officials said. The bombs hit shortly after 1pm local time in the eastern city of Jalalabad.”There were two explosions, both at security posts,” provincial military corps official Agha Jan said.